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TwiceHorn

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by TwiceHorn

  1. No, Josh, they really aren't. Let me know when the Russian-backed Syrian tanks show up at the border. Oh, wait, Russia's not really backing anyone these days and they're fresh out of tanks.
  2. I mean, yeah, they took it in a war waged against them. I suppose they would have been within their rights at that time to move in as many Israelis as wanted to go, but they didn't need the territory, so they just kind of left it until fairly recently.
  3. I wasn't picking at you, just had looked at the limitations issue and am pretty familiar with the pled/summary judgment facts. But it is worth noting that the banks have all been paid, TO DATE. They haven't been paid off completely.
  4. Texas courts grant these motions routinely. Federal courts, which I think all of these are in, somewhat less so. If Lindell can't come up with substitute counsel, which is going to be hard given what's public about these (many times the wording of the motions is such that you can't quite tell that it's non-payment and certainly how much non-payment), the judge may not let them out. If I was trying to withdraw from a federal civil case, I'd feel a lot better about it if there was substitute counsel. Otherwise, I'd expect some indentured servitude.
  5. Well, in this particular case, most of these loans were made around 2011 and in any case before 2014 They have not been refinanced since. Because if they had, there would not be a statute of limitations argument. All of these loans were subject to covenants under which annually he would re-submit financial statements and certify no material change in financial condition, under penalty of raising rates, changing terms, and possibly foreclosure. Trump argues that the fraud, if any, occurred when the loans closed, which is all outside limitations. James argues that each submission was a separate fraudulent act, and many of them are within limitations.
  6. I'm not so concerned with the existence of the remedy. I certainly have no sympathy for Trump. I just have pretty good intuitions in a lot of cases for what will hold up on appeal and what won't and often what judges will decide. I'm certainly not infallible and am surprised with some frequency. I'd feel better about this remedy on appeal if there was some tangible financial damage.
  7. Yeah and also the "two sets of laws" is really done and dusted. We'd all be prosecuted for bank fraud if we did what Trump did, most likely. These loans were all done during the Obama Administration when the beloved Preet Bharara was US Attorney with jurisdiction. They completely failed to prosecute him. And a lot of others like him. And limitations is long passed. As much as we hate Trump, I don't think it's a particularly good idea to try to fix that gross omission with other, non-criminal statutes. He violated 63(12). Good, that's been proven. I'm just concerned that this corporate charter remedy is not going to stand up on appeal. It may, great. Fuck Trump. But I think there may be otherwise valid reasons that it doesn't hold up.
  8. This is the thing that cheeses me off about Israel probably the most. They should be withdrawing/disengaging with the occupied territories as much as possible.
  9. I would have guessed you'd been around longer than that, although that's plenty long.
  10. Again, you're speaking in terms of deterrence of further criminal or unlawful actions. That's never been a raison d'etre for any kind of civil action, that's solely reserved for criminal cases (and of dubious practical effect). Sure, the civil system has punitive and deterrent effects at times. I mean, even here, if Trump does this some more, he's risking getting his ass sued off again. You're not going to get too far with an appellate court arguing that the most severe remedy is justified here by its deterrent effect. Yes, this was blatantly unlawful, but it only worked for him because his banks were willing and complicit, and seem to have mostly protected themselves with their own due diligence, or just blind luck. The most hideous frauds cause financial devastation to innocent parties that relied on the fraud. That just isn't here. If it was here, I'd be less concerned about corporate charter revocations on appeal.
  11. Fair point. One thing that skews this whole deal is that Trump was never criminally prosecuted for any of this shit. He probably should have been. And that would make this seem like a less critical thing; the last clear chance to bring this outlaw to some sort of justice. But, the civil system is not about punishing wrongdoers or deterring their conduct, as you know. It's about compensating the harmed, mostly. Even when a public party like the AG is authorized by a statute to bring what would otherwise be private civil cases, the usual master remedy is an injunction against further unlawful activity, that a private party can't usually get. The charter thing is a bit like an injunction though: we won't order you not to do it again, we'll just take away your ability to do it again in this state, altogether.
  12. Well, when enacting statutes like Exec. Law 63, that's a policy decision that gets implemented through the statute: fraud and illegality in business are undesirable. And when remedies are created apart from the private party (civil suits by the defrauded) and criminal cases under other statutes, that seems to be a policy determination that harm exists apart from damage to private parties, e.g. the systemic harm to which you refer. When a statute is vague and broad like that, it invites the courts to fill in the gaps with "legal" decisions that at some level (e.g. SCOTUS) may become purely policy decisions, only slightly confined by "legal" analysis. But they're always, to some degree or another, policy decisions.
  13. That is basically the disgorgement remedy, yes. Regardless of whether anyone harmed (the usual justification for monetary damages -- compensation), you cough up your ill-gotten gains. That seems to be on the table and I think much less likely to get reversed by the court of appeals. My original statement was that I was concerned that the appellate courts may not find the "death penalty" remedy of revocation of charters to be justified by the overall course of conduct here. It may, it may not. I am not 100% sure whether it is appropriate or not, but knowing how courts work, I think there's a pretty decent chance that part of the ruling gets reversed.
  14. I am fairly familiar with 63(12), particularly as applied in this case, see my subsequent posts. I also acknowledge the interest rate risk. And good points have been made about systemic harm. Nevertheless, those are better justifications for the existence of this statute, granting the AG broad powers and low burdens of proof. They are not necessarily good justifications for invoking the most severe remedy under the statute in this case (by in this case, I mean these particular circumstances and actual proof, not the fact that it involves DJT). All fraud and illegality and unlawfulness causes systemic harm. That's why it tends to be criminal in addition to civil. We tend to reserve the harshest remedies for those cases of fraud that cause actual (for lack of a better term) pecuniary losses to private parties or public entities. I'm not actually out of my depth here. It may have been inartfully worded, but as stated above, in the grand scheme of fraudulent conduct and private or public party harm, this is quite small-scale. Yes, there's the systemic harm, but that's common to all fraud, what's missing here is the big financial losses to big banks (boo hoo), pension funds (ouch), and private investors (some combination of boo hoo and ouch).
  15. Good point. Oddly enough, in most cases, NY Law is strongly favorable to big business.
  16. Well, certainly in a residential loan transaction, you'd probably be indicted for bank fraud by the feds. Me too. Most of us here. Trump probably should have, but that's water under the bridge. This is a civil case with civil remedies. The question here is not whether he's going to be "punished" (civil cases usually aren't about punishment but compensation), but to what extent and with what particular remedies. One of the other remedies provided by 63(12) is disgorgement of gains as a result of the fraudulent conduct. That doesn't require anyone to be financially harmed, it just recognizes that you got something from fraudulent conduct and should cough it up. That's where the $250 million comes from, and I assume that is the proceeds of the loans where he employed the fraudulent statements.
  17. Let's get something super-clear here. Yes, most states can judicially dissolve corporations, to include LLCs, for fraudulent or other business-related misconduct. That generally would be proven in private-party lawsuits or criminal proceedings brought by the government. What is different here is that Executive Law 63(12) empowers the NY AG to bring a suit on behalf of the public to halt fraudulent conduct and obtain certain remedies for it. But as I have said many times, the fraud that can be proven under 63(12) is not traditional fraud that requires: a knowing false statement (made with the intention that the party to whom its made relies on the statement) about something material to the transaction with the relying party justifiable reliance by the party to whom the false statement is made (that means sophisticated parties can't just ignore what they know is utter bullshit) where the reliance results in financial loss or harm to the relying party It has been made clear in these proceedings that 63(12) does not require the last two elements of common-law civil fraud, or, for that matter the parenthetical intention of the first one. That is rather unusual. In the case of 63(12), it's simply the use of fraudulent statements or documents in business transactions, whether anyone relies on them or not and whether any relying party is actually harmed or not. It is true that most bank/mortgage fraud criminal statutes do not require either reliance by the recipient or any actual loss, but that's criminal statutes, not civil.
  18. Itemize for me, please, the financial losses incurred by these transactions. I think anyone with half a legal brain would admit that cancellation of business "licenses" is the most extreme remedy under this statute and punitive. That would tend to mean that the violation of the statute would tend to be of the most egregious sort, causing the most egregious harm to private and especially public interests. Think Bernie Madoff, Allen Stanford, hell, Bankman-Fried. Whether you can conjure some theoretical harm pretty much takes it out of the foregoing. The unfortunate fact is that the banks have gotten paid. No one has incurred the type of losses usually associated with the most egregious fraud.
  19. I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree. But it's not just form an LLC or corporation in NY, it's to do business at all in New York. The asshole has a lot of properties there and, depending on how this shakes out, could be a forced divestiture of those properties. And that, you have to admit, is an extreme remedy. I'd love to see it, but I'm not sure it's legally justifiable. If he had perpetrated massive traditional fraud, causing the usual losses of investment/lent money, on private businesses and public entities, that would be one thing. But that has not been proven.
  20. And, as long as you pay the loans back on time, who is harmed? The risk in bank fraud is that the bank gives a loan that can't be paid back and will be undercollateralized in that event. There's also a smaller harm in that perhaps they give a better interest rate, and so lose out on the differential. That would be damn near impossible to quantify. The fact is, I don't really believe these lending institutions and insurers were defrauded and if James had had to prove reliance on the financial statements, she would not have been able to win. She actually had to make the point that reliance and intention/scienter were not elements of her proof on several occasions. As to the property tax authorities, they've been free to try to use these statements to raise his tax burden at any time. That's not really convincing.
  21. Yeah, that underlies all of it. That more than a handful of lunatics find anything he says or writes salient.
  22. Here's why I don't like the "apartheid state" thing. The occupied territories can certainly be analogized to an apartheid state. But the population of Israel proper is 20% Arab Muslims. They are not broadly persecuted, they have political parties that get people elected to the Knesset appointed as Cabinet officials, and more or less participate in every aspect of israeli society. And this despite some factions openly advocating for the eradication of Israel.
  23. I fucking hate that piece of shit so much. I can't stand to listen to his cunthole bleat and I can't stand to read his barely-literate screeds.
  24. I beg to differ. The haters are the ones certain that he'll fail, that every negative data point discerned with acute hindsight bias is yet another sure sign that he'll fail. They're the ones drunk on Guyana punch. The rest of us remain open-minded and uncertain that past performance guarantees future results. We're not sure he'll succeed, or fail. One thing is that the program does seem to be moving in a better direction than it has in the last 10 years.
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